Speakers

Keynote

Richard Sheridan

CEO, Chief Storyteller and co-founder, Menlo Innovations

Build a Workplace People Love — Just add Joy

Create an intentional team culture focused on the business value of joy and unleash the human energy and the results you always knew were possible.

The CIO invited me into his office and closed the door. Before he took me for a tour of his operation, he had a few stories to share. Important stories. Last year's project was a disaster. Late, lots of quality issues, in short, a failure in every dimension. His boss, the CEO, had just presented him with a very personal ultimatum: deliver the next project by April 4th, "or else".

"Or else what," I asked?

His team was burned out and scared. They were a hard-working and dedicated group, but fear and demoralization had set in and he didn't know what to do next. That's why he wanted to talk to me, he had heard things about my company, things that seemed too good to be true, but he had to hear them firsthand. He wanted hope, inspiration, and a practical way to get there.

I told him about my own journey from joy to fear to disillusionment back to joy. It was simple, but, of course, simple isn't easy. I wasn't sure he and his organization were ready; "manufactured fear" is a powerful drug.

In this talk, I will share with you what I shared with him. I will explore what an intentionally joyful culture must choose as its focus. I will discuss what joy looks like, feels like, how it is organized. Along the way, you will be confronted by paradoxical approaches of how workplace noise increases productivity, how two people at one computer outperforms hero-based organizations 10-to-1, how rigor and discipline emanate from a shared-belief system, how transparency conquers fear, how all of the disciplines you study including agile, lean, and six sigma when done well are really about building human relationships at the intersections of business and technology, between project management and software development, between development and design and how quality can be a natural result of a team built on trust.

This is not a theoretical talk, but rather a talk built from well over a decade of experience of leading a team focused on "the business value of joy". There will be lots of room for discussion with the audience. The audience will begin to understand why thousands of people make the journey to Ann Arbor, Michigan every year to see The Menlo Software Factory firsthand, and why so many more are reading about it in Joy, Inc. – How We Built A Workplace People Love.

About Richard

Menlo Innovations CEO Rich Sheridan had an all consuming thought during a difficult mid-career in the chaotic technology industry ...

things can be better. Much better. He had to find a way. His search led him to books, authors and history, including recalling childhood visits to Greenfield Village every summer. The excitement of the Edison Menlo Park New Jersey Lab served as his siren call to create a workplace filled with camaraderie, human energy, creativity and productivity.

Ultimately, Rich and his co-founder James Goebel invented their own company in 2001 to "end human suffering in the world as it relate to technology" by returning joy to one of the most unique endeavors mankind has ever undertaken: the invention of software.

Their unique approach to custom software design, they named it High-tech Anthropology® has produced custom software that delights users rather than frustrating them. The programming team creates the software that works every day without the emergencies that are all too common in the tech industry. The process itself is so interesting that almost 4,000 people a year travel from around the world just to see how they do it. Many spend a week or more studying "The Menlo Way" being taught by the Menlonians who love to share their experience and knowledge.

In 2013, Rich and his publisher Penguin Random House took a chance that a business book with the words joy and love on the cover might have impact. They had no idea how the world yearned for such a message. His best selling book, Joy, Inc. - How We Built a Workplace People Love now has Rich traveling the world speaking about joy, creativity, and human energy in the workplace.

Workshop Speakers

Heidi Helfand

Director of Engineering Excellence, Procore Technologies

Learn about the difference between coaching and giving advice. Explore the art of mentoring.

In this workshop you will learn about the difference between coaching and giving advice. You will understand and practice deep listening and how to draw out the other person by asking open-ended powerful questions that empower them to serve up their own answers. We'll go over how bring the people you coach to meaningful accountability that encourages action or changes in the way that they want to "show up" in the world. We'll also talk about the art of mentoring and giving advice. That too has its place especially when we are working with teams to apply a certain philosophy such as Lean and Agile development.

About Heidi

Heidi brings a Practitioner approach with 18 years coaching and influencing cross-functional teams. She was an early employee at two highly successful startups from roughly 10 team members to 700. The first was ExpertCity, Inc. (acquired by CitrixOnline) where she was on the development team that invented GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. After that she was ScrumMaster turned Principal Agile Coach at AppFolio, Inc., a SAAS workflow software company that went public in 2015. She is currently Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies.

Heidi is an Organizational Relationships Systems Coach (ORSC) with the goal of helping teams self-reflect and shift from working in silos to working as cohesive teams. She is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) with an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential through the International Coach Federation (ICF). This coaching expertise is critical for helping people transform their mindsets.

Jennifer Bonine

VP, Global Delivery and Solutions,tap|QA, Inc.

Transitioning to Agile Leadership

Help your teams transform and be successful in an "agile" world - learn what skills you need to be an effective leader your teams want to follow.

The key to helping your teams transform and be successful in an "agile" world is to know what skills you need to be effective, and in turn help your team navigate change. This session will be focused on providing you with a toolkit for agile leadership. We will explore your level of acceptance of change, how adaptive you are, and strategies to help people adapt to changes. We will provide exercises that enable you to learn your leadership style and understand your blind spots as a leader. What metrics should you be baselining and measuring against as you adopt agile development methodologies instead of a traditional SDLC? Leave with ideas on what will work for you and your organization. Explore with other leaders during hands on activities how to influence and promote ideas and change, as well as how to inspire others to follow and invest in your ideas. Finally, learn how to partner across cross-functional teams and geographies. After this session, you will have the tools to make sure that you are an agile leader that your teams want to follow.

About Jennifer

Jennifer Bonine is a VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA, Inc., a global company that specializes in strategic solutions for businesses. Jennifer began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. She has held executive level positions leading development, quality assurance and testing, organizational development, and process improvement teams for Fortune 500 companies in several domains. In a recent engagement for one of the world's largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite. In her career, she has had several opportunities to build global teams from the ground up and has been fortunate to see how many of the world's top companies operate from the C-Suite viewpoint. She recently has been helps companies larger and small adapt to the age of IoT and connected system of systems engaging in next generation solutions and helping companies adapt to the ever changing business landscape.

Kalpesh Shah

Director of Agile Transformation, IntraEdge

Sean McKeever

Director of Product Management, Edgenuity

Mastering Product Management: Move your skills to the next level

Take your product management skills to the next level and learn how to work in amazing ways while leading your product teams in new directions.

You've all heard the stories about amazing product teams at the best software companies, but how do you work in these amazing ways while leading your product teams in new directions? This hands-on workshop will help you to take your product management skills to the next level!

You'll be learning about modern product management principles and immediately applying your learning during small group working sessions. Our hands-on activities include playing the role of product managers for popular products that we all use on a daily basis, so you will learn by doing instead of being lectured.

By the end of the workshop you will be able to:

Run dual-track agile (discovery and delivery) with your product teams

Create rich and effective story maps to represent your customer needs and informs the solution to be delivered

About Kalpesh

Kalpesh is a Culture Hacker, Speaker & Enterprise Agile Coach with IntraEdge Agile Solutions with experience in creating and working with different shapes and sizes of Agile teams. He has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 50 companies to startups, helping them make the transition to Agile way of working, implementing Agile at Scale, employ Lean Product Development approaches and instill Lean Startup mindset. As a monk on a spiritual journey, he is also on a journey of discovering, learning and implementing different agile techniques to create happier teams which in turn create better products, his version of enlightenment! His latest passion is Culture Hacking through continuous experimentation which will promote innovative thinking, extend openness, embody rationality, and bring design thinking into teams.

About Sean

Sean has worked in product management for 18 years with a variety of technology companies, primarily in the K-16 education market. He also spent two years on mobile app and mobile platform product management at Workiva, which is where he first started using dual-track agile methods. His work there involved frequent interactions with prolific Product Management consultants, Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton, which accelerated his understanding and implementation of great discovery and delivery methodologies. At his current company, Edgenuity, Sean is leading the product organization through the transition from single-track agile to dual-track agile methodologies.

Michael Hall

Senior Agile Coach & Trainer, Agile Velocity

Lean Startup Workshop: Experiment-Driven Development

A fun hands-on workshop that explores Lean Startup principles to ensure we build the right product. Applies to all companies/projects, not just startups.

As an Agile team member, you have a responsibility to ensure that the right product is being built. Warning - you can still build the wrong product using Agile! In Eric Ries' book The Lean Startup, he poses the question "What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?"

Lean Startup is designed to ensure we build the right product. This popular Agile method is applicable to all companies and projects, not just startups.

The workshop concludes with a "marshmallow challenge" project simulation contest utilizing the Lean Startup principles where teams will attempt to break the current world record for highest marshmallow on top of spaghetti sticks.

Whether you are new to Agile or a mature "agilista", you will leave the workshop armed with new techniques that can be applied immediately on your Agile projects.

At the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

Evaluate and apply Lean Startup principles to your Agile projects

Differentiate between experiment-driven and assumption-driven development

Organize project efforts with high levels of innovation and experimentation

Effectively de-risk development efforts through validated learning

About Michael

Michael is a reformed waterfall software developer. Half of his career was spent missing customer expectations by using thick requirement documents, big design up-front, deferring integration, and pitching shoddy software over the fence to QA. The latter half of his career has been exceeding customer expectations using Agile methods such as Scrum, Lean, XP, Kanban, and Lean Startup. Today, Michael is a Senior Agile Coach/Trainer at Agile Velocity with 15 years of Agile transformation experience. He has practical experience in leading enterprise scaled Agile transformations, Agile process creation for startup companies, team coaching, individual mentoring, and developing/delivering Agile training.

Michael Vizdos

Managing Director, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC

Scrum in the Real World -- Focus. #deliver

Actively participate in addressing real world problems, issues and concerns that you can apply when you return to your real world Scrum teams.

In this workshop, you'll work with Michael Vizdos and other participants in learning how to Focus and #deliver using Scrum in the Real World. We will quickly review Scrum (to set context) and then spend the time during the session addressing real world problems, issues and concerns that you can apply when you return to your real world Scrum teams. This workshop is for all levels of experience and requires active participation (nothing physical!).

About Michael

Michael Vizdos is the creator of www.ImplementingScrum.com and travels internationally working with clients to improve delivery of products to their customers using Scrum and other Agile techniques. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer (since 2006) with over twenty-five years experience in all facets of software development and product delivery. He is active in the Lean Startup community; one of his current projects can be found at www.OneShinyObject.com. He co-authored a book with Scott Ambler about the Enterprise Unified Process and speaks at user groups and conferences internationally about all of the above topics (and more!).

Michael Vizdos is ​an active supporter, sponsor, and past speaker for the Phoenix Scrum User Group and Gangplank (both in Arizona and Virginia). He lives in Richmond, Virginia and can be found on [email protected] and www.michaelvizdos.com.

Peter Green

Agile Coach and Trainer, Agile For All

Agile Approaches to Change in your Personal and Organizational Life

Change is hard, both personally and organizationally. Learn about some of the most powerful tools to help encourage meaningful change.

TWe all know change is hard, both personally and organizationally. This workshop will introduce some of the most powerful tools I've come across to help encourage meaningful change. We'll look at the four ground conditions that must be in place, the psychology that holds us back when we really want to make a change but struggle, and two powerful techniques to help us break through resistance and start to make incremental, positive changes in our lives and our organizations.

About Peter

Peter Green is an Executive Agile Leadership Coach, Trainer, and Speaker. He helps leaders take full advantage of their gifts to thrive in complex times. Peter combines individual leadership development with his research in next generation organizational models to help executives lead engaged, high performing Agile organizations. As the Agile Transformation Leader at Adobe Systems, he helped the company make the critical business transition from perpetual desktop products to the subscription-based Creative Cloud. Now the Principle Leadership Coach for Agile For All, Peter is a CST and co-creator of the Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Leadership program.

Richard Kasperowski

Agile Trainer and Coach

Building Great Teams: Culture and Core Protocols

Your team can be ten times better. The Core Protocols are one way to make your team great.

Your team can be ten times better.

What does that mean? That means your professional team can accomplish 10x more work, do it with 10x more quality, 10x faster, or with 10x less resources. Your family can be 10x happier. Your school can be 10x more effective at helping people learn. Your community group can be 10x better at making life better for the people it serves. Even you yourself can be 10x more effective at getting what you want.

In other words, you can be great. Your team can be great.

Greatness

Can you say these things about your teams?:

My projects are completed effortlessly on schedule and in budget every time.

Every team I've ever been on has shared a vision.

In meetings, we only ever do what will get results.

No one blames "management" or anyone else, if they don't get what they want.

Everybody shares their best ideas right away.

Ideas are immediately unanimously approved, improved, or rejected by the team.

Action on approved ideas begins immediately.

Conflict is always resolved swiftly and productively.

The Core Protocols are one way to make teams that have these characteristics.

Richard Lawrence

Co-owner, Agile Trainer and Coach, Agile For All

80/20 Product Ownership: Slicing at Every Level of Detail

Learn how to slice projects into high-value early features, features into good stories, big stories into smaller ones, and how to manage it all.

Learn how to slice projects into high-value early features, features into good user stories, big stories into small stories, and how to manage it all with a continuous backlog refinement approach.

One of the most powerful skill-sets for Product Owners and Agile teams is being able to find the thin slices in every big idea, every feature, even every story that will deliver maximum impact with minimum time and effort. The 80/20 principle suggests that most of the value in every project, feature, or user story (the 80%) comes from just a small slice of it (the 20%).

Are you sure you're spending your team's time on what matters most? The average Scrum team in the US costs over $5,000 per day. Odds are, you're wasting hundreds or even thousands of dollars every day on the low-value parts of your projects, features, and stories.

There's an old saying in poker: "If you're at the table 30 minutes and you don't know who the sucker is, get up—you're the sucker." The same sort of thing applies here. If you don't know what the low-value part of a project, feature, or story was—the part you intentionally cut out—you spent money building it.

Agile practitioners everywhere are struggling with this. But it doesn't have to be hard. You can learn to split stories faster than you probably estimate them today.

About Richard

Richard is co-owner of Agile For All. He trains and coaches teams and organizations to become happier and more productive. He draws on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science. Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room.

Session Speakers

Allison Pollard

Agile Coach & Principal Consultant, Improving

Barry Forrest

Principal Consultant, Improving

Brewing Great Agile Team Dynamics – No More Bitter Beer Face Communications

About Allison

As an agile coach with Improving in Dallas, Allison Pollard helps people discover their agile instincts and develop their coaching abilities. Allison is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, a foodie, and proud glasses wearer. Allison has presented at a large number of events, including Keep Austin Agile, Scrum Gathering, Dallas and Houston TechFests, UTDallas Project Management Symposium, and PMI Professional Development conferences.

About Barry

As a Principal Consultant with Improving in Dallas, Barry is a web developer, Scrum Master, and agilist. Barry loves helping make work life better for teams and leaving things in a better state than when he was introduced to the situation. Barry is also an award-winning homebrewer and an avid amateur photographer.

Cat Swetel

Agile & Lean Consultant

The Agile Metrics You Should Use but Don't

Have you ever had a gut feeling a project is about to go off course but no way to validate (or invalidate) that feeling? Has your team ever been burned by an inaccurate estimate or unreasonable expectation? Have you ever wished you could peer a bit into the future?

Navigating the uncertainty of knowledge work is often difficult and uncomfortable. During this session, learn new ways to visualize your team's reliability and variability of delivery using the data you already collect. Instead of relying entirely on your gut or laboring over estimates, learn to articulate trade offs, predict outcomes and describe their likelihood. While this session doesn't teach you to eliminate uncertainty or allow you to see the future, it does provide you with tools to explore and chart a reasonable course through the inherent ambiguity of knowledge work.

About Cat

Cat Swetel specializes in using Lean techniques to increase the agility and adaptability of large and long-historied technology organizations. Specifically, she has worked with Fortune 500 companies in highly regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare. Cat has been invited to speak internationally about her pragmatic approach to enabling technology leaders to make better, more timely, data-informed decisions. She is passionate about creating an inclusive technology industry, and she donates much time and effort in pursuit of this goal.

Christine Novello

Lean and Agile: It's not just for Software Anymore

Moving your development team to scrum is so 2016! Building on her experiences in coaching technology driven product teams in the use of lean and agile, Christine has extended lean and agile practices to marketing teams, book editing teams, executive leadership teams and -- yes -- even residential construction. Join her to hear about the good and the bad (and even the ugly), and share some of your own experiences as well.

About Christine

Christine Novello is an Enterprise Agile Coach, Trainer, and life-long learner. She leverages a proven, results-driven approach to coach teams in the major Agile frameworks (Scrum, Lean, XP, Scrumban, Kanban, SAFe) and to scale those Agile methods across large, complex, globally dispersed programs and enterprises. A committed and visible servant-leader, Christine models continuous improvement principles and empowers world-class teams in the alignment of development, user experience and business process best practices. She's a passionate and experienced Project Manager and Trainer, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), and SAFe Program Consultant (SPC4). Pairing broad technical experience with deep analytical skills, Christine identifies and implements process improvements and performance enhancement opportunities. She's an experienced coach and mentor to both teams and executives, helping stakeholders realize their Agile and organizational transformation goals while enabling Agile teams to achieve high performance benchmarks.

Christine is an Associate Director in Cognizant's Digital Engineering / Agile Center of Excellence, and is based in Phoenix, AZ.

Derek Neighbors

CTO, Tanga

Blockbuster Product Management

Managing consistent delivery of a magnificent product or product portfolio is difficult. How do you keep all stakeholders engaged? How far out is the planning horizon? Which role is responsible for delivering, monitoring or executing which pieces? How do you achieve alignment from executives? How do you deal with competing priorities and shared resources?

You will be teleported into the heart of a blockbuster producing movie studio through the power of metaphor to learn how you can super charge your products and portfolio to release hit after hit.

About Derek

Derek Neighbors is a serial entrepreneur who helps people bring ideas to reality. Derek co-founded Gangplank, a collaborative workspace, in 2008 to help encourage local creatives to explore innovative ideas and create what they are passionate about. He is the CTO at Tanga.com. Former partner at Integrum Technologies, a consulting services firm, that helps companies build high performing teams to compete in the new economy. He has taught entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

Dimitri Ponomareff

Enterprise Coach, Torak Agile Coaching

Agile Organizational Design & Kanban Flow

Organizational Design is a critical step in the overall Agile transformation and successful adoption. Dimitri shares his vast experience to illustrate how organizations can structure themselves to get the most benefit from being Agile and Lean. This presentation focuses on flowing work effectively using an Agile Canvas (i.e. Organizational Design) and leveraging Kanban boards to ensure transparency/accountability at all levels of the organization. Once we master setting up the ideal organizational structure, we will explore actual Kanban board examples to visualize the flow of work across the organization. Ultimately, it's all about connecting clear goals, with meaningful features and well written stories; while reducing dependencies and creating simple communication channels. You will walk away with real examples and techniques that you can implement immediately within your organization.

About Dimitri

Dimitri Ponomareff (www.linkedin.com/in/dimka5) is a passionate coach, facilitator and public speaker. He has the ability to relate to people from all walks of life and at every level within an organization. He can motivate and energize individuals, teams or entire organizations. Dimitri is consistently recognized as an effective and successful change agent who is able to mobilize people on a path of continuous improvement. Dimitri is a certified coach and "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" facilitator and uses his vast experience to build highly-focused and productive teams. Dimitri has coached for such organizations as American Express, Charles Schwab, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Choice Hotels, Best Western, JDA Software, LifeLock, First Solar, and Infusionsoft.

Gus Felderhoff

Senior Principal Consultant, Valore Partners

The Words we Use

Our culture, mindset, and language are all highly intertwined. The vocabulary we use on a daily basis affects our actions and the actions of others. We develop patterns based upon the words we use. Individuals, teams, and organizations have, sometimes not so obvious, practices centered around their culture and mindset. When adopting agile practices or trying to improve, we often find the barriers to getting better are rooted within our culture itself. Taking steps to improve is challenging. Shifting the culture of an organization can seem infeasible. Adjusting our internal mindset can be grim. The words we use internally in our thoughts and in our communication carry significant influence.

Let's have a discussion around a technique that can influence change centered on our vocabulary. We can explore the 'F' word, the 'S' word, and the 'P' word. We will discuss how this technique has produced results and how you can put it to use in your team.

About Gus

Gus is an IT Consultant with 20 years of experience in architecting and developing software products and systems. As a Senior Principle Consultant with Valore Partners, he has worked to deliver technical solutions to a varied demographic of companies. Gus is an advocate of Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery practices.

Harry Koehnemann

SAFe Fellow, Director of Technology, 321 Gang

Identifying the Ten Essential Elements to a Scaled Agile Adoption

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the leading method for scaling Lean-Agile principles and practices. SAFe 4.5 introduced a configuration, Essential SAFe, which represents the minimal elements of SAFe necessary for a successful implementation. This configuration servers many benefits. First, it provides a starting point for implementing SAFe. It also describes the most critical elements needed to realize the majority of the framework's benefits. And finally, Essential SAFe addresses the common question, "How closely does an organization need to follow SAFe in order to get the full benefits?". Come discuss these ten vital elements needed to realize maximum results from an agile scaling initiative.

About Harry

Harry is Director of Technology for 321 Gang where he helps organizations in aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, and others building some of the world's largest and most complex systems adopt Lean-Agile methods and SAFe. He has decades of experience with product development lifecycle practices and the integrated toolsets that automate them including lean, agile, MBSE, requirements management, quality management, and the traceability necessary for compliance. Harry is a regular presenter on Lean-Agile topics at agile, engineering, and government conferences and is also a SAFe Fellow.

Heidi Helfand

Director of Engineering Excellence, Procore Technologies

Dynamic Reteaming: The Art & Wisdom of Changing Teams

When your team compositions change it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong - it could be the secret to your success. Changing teams can help reduce the risk of attrition, learning & career stagnation, and the development of knowledge silos. I'll share original case studies from well known companies that enable dynamic change to their teams propelled by retrospectives and other agile, humanistic practices. In this talk, you'll learn tips and tricks for building a sustainable company by changing teams - whether it's by growing and splitting teams, merging teams, seeding teams, adding new people across multiple teams and more. I'll also share reteaming antipatterns and what not to do.

About Heidi

Heidi brings a Practitioner approach with 18 years coaching and influencing cross-functional teams. She was an early employee at two highly successful startups from roughly 10 team members to 700. The first was ExpertCity, Inc. (acquired by CitrixOnline) where she was on the development team that invented GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. After that she was ScrumMaster turned Principal Agile Coach at AppFolio, Inc., a SAAS workflow software company that went public in 2015. She is currently Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies.

Heidi is an Organizational Relationships Systems Coach (ORSC) with the goal of helping teams self-reflect and shift from working in silos to working as cohesive teams. She is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC) with an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential through the International Coach Federation (ICF). This coaching expertise is critical for helping people transform their mindsets.

Ingrid Sutherland

Enterprise Agile Coach, IntraEdge

Scaling to the "carpet side" or outside software

Is it okay that only IT and software delivery teams are Agile? Does it matter if HR and Finance, Sales and Marketing still do things the way they always have?

YES!

Without change throughout the whole organization you cannot truly be Agile.

How do we scale Agile to the "carpet side" so our whole organization can reap the benefits from Agile? First, we have to open our minds to the possibilities of Agile and understand it's not a prescriptive set of steps but a different way of looking at things.

About Ingrid

After working in Agile environments for nearly seven years it has become like a second skin. It is intrinsic to my nature of "learn as I do". I have an aptitude for learning quickly and a facility with conveying that knowledge to others in either written or verbal form, at different levels of an organization.

I am a seasoned team builder and facilitator well versed in the language of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and the use of tools and systems used in project management/product development.

I have almost 30 years experience in software development, and have held roles in Quality Assurance/testing, technical support, system analysis, and technical writing, customer service and program/project management, as well as assistant to executive level stakeholders in R&D (~4 years). This gives me a unique perspective when working with organizations transitioning to Agile.

Jennifer Bonine

VP, Global Delivery and Solutions,tap|QA, Inc.

Technology Leadership in the age of digital transformation: Are you adapting?

We are working in a world where we are asked to be agile and manage change on a daily basis, but are you struggling to see the benefits of being agile and all the change you are being asked to make? The role of the leader is changing significantly and what is required for success has dramatically changed. Are you stuck in old patterns? Are you not seeing results while other teams or leaders are? It is important to understand old leadership patterns or habits that may be holding you back from realizing success in this new world for leaders. What people expect and need from their leadership has changed and you need to understand how to attract and retain talent in your teams. One thing that remains the same is people don’t leave companies or organizations they leave leaders. Even the way we think about "teams" has changed and we need to understand the new dynamic of a "team". You need to understand how to adapt to this world we live in as leaders and the strategies necessary to bring along others in this fast-paced digital transformation age.

About Jennifer

Jennifer Bonine is a VP of global delivery and solutions for tap|QA, Inc., a global company that specializes in strategic solutions for businesses. Jennifer began her career in consulting, implementing large ERP solutions. She has held executive level positions leading development, quality assurance and testing, organizational development, and process improvement teams for Fortune 500 companies in several domains. In a recent engagement for one of the world's largest technology companies, Jennifer served as a strategy executive and in corporate marketing for the C-Suite. In her career, she has had several opportunities to build global teams from the ground up and has been fortunate to see how many of the world's top companies operate from the C-Suite viewpoint. She recently has been helps companies larger and small adapt to the age of IoT and connected system of systems engaging in next generation solutions and helping companies adapt to the ever changing business landscape.

Jeremy Wood

Sr. Agile Coach and Delivery Manager, MATRIX

Mob Programming: Without Torches and Pitchforks

After a sprint planning session, the developers each take a story to work on 'their part' of the sprint; when finished, they give it to QA to test. When a defect is found it is passed back to developers to fix and then back to testing and repeated until it works correctly.

Doesn't this sound more like a bunch of individuals working in sequence than a team actively working together to deliver? Is quality to be 'tested' at the end to ensure compliance, rather than being built in?

Jeremy provides an introduction to Mob Programming, some of the basic principles and concepts, and how this goes far beyond something that only developers do. Jeremy explains how developers, QA, and product owners collaborate in real time to deliver higher quality, continuous learning, and true team collaboration. Ultimately, the bottleneck in software development isn't how fast you type, but how fast you can think.

Learning Outcomes

How 5+ people can be effective working on one thing

Creating a continuous learning environment

Guidelines for successful mobbing

Workspace setup

Handling completing solutions

About Jeremy

Jeremy Wood, MATRIX Sr. Agile Coach and Delivery Manager, has over 15+ years of management, consulting, and academic career spanning small companies to Fortune 10 organizations.

His expertise spans from his diverse background encompassing manufacturing, retail, higher education, non-profit, K-12 education, and airline industries. His passion for creating tailored solutions for each client is largely based on his passion for the Agile mindset. With a focus on outcomes and overall business agility to adapt to ever changing market changes; he leverages best practices from popular Agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and XP to scaling solutions including SAFe, LeSS, DaD, Nexus, and Scrum at Scale. He emphasizes the importance of adopting an Agile mindset across the entire organization, not just IT; where true business agility exists.

Jonathan Cottrell

Director of Marketing, IntraEdge

UX is for Everyone

UX isn't just for designers or product managers. It's for everyone. Learn how to bring everyone to the table and make everyone an advocate for the user, designing exponentially better solutions that win in the marketplace.

About Jonathan

Jonathan is the Director of Marketing at IntraEdge. As an executive at GoDaddy, he was able to prove how Design Thinking and UX can create a huge impact to the product development cycle. After GoDaddy, Jonathan has mentored many startup companies and has shown them the proven path of success around how to quickly take products to market.

Kalpesh Shah

Director of Agile Transformation, IntraEdge

Outcome Over Output: Don't Be A Backlog Lumberjack!

As agile movement sweep across the industry many organizations have started practicing different agile frameworks. As they go through these agile transformations, quite often their focus is on implementing the different elements of framework and using measures like velocities, story points and burn down charts to measure the progress of the teams and forget the core purpose on why they switched to agile way of working in first place turning these teams into user story machines and their team members into backlog lumberjacks.

A successful agile team is not about how many stories they can finish or how frequently they release to production but rather more about hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.

Through story telling Kalpesh will talk about the real essence of going agile and how NOT to turn your teams into backlog lumberjacks.

Learning Outcomes:

Team members will learn the most important goal of an agile team i.e "Speed of learning" and "applying that learning".

Product Owners will learn how being a great product owner isn't just about writing perfect user stories or creating a healthy backlog but about bringing teams close to the user or the "problem they are trying to solve".

Scrum Masters or Agile Managers will learn that a great agile team isn't measured by story points, burn-downs or velocities but instead are measured by "velocity of learning".

Leaders & Executives will learn how in an agile organization and for Agile teams its less about managing and more about mentoring.

About Kalpesh

Kalpesh Shah is Speaker, Trainer & Coach with over 7 years of experience in creating and working with different shapes and sizes of Agile teams. He has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 50 companies to startups, helping them make the transition to Agile way of working, implementing Agile at Scale, employ Lean Product Development approaches and instill Lean Startup mindset. His latest passion is Culture Hacking through continuous experimentation which will promote innovative thinking, extend openness, embody rationality, and bring design thinking into teams.

Larry Apke

Agile Program Manager, Oracle

Building in Quality: The Beauty of Behavior Driven Development

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) began as a means of helping developers practice Test Driven Development (TDD). In this it was successful, but it quickly proved its value in many other ways. In this presentation, Larry Apke quotes heavily from the work of Uncle Bob Martin to make the case for TDD and then explains how developers can use BDD to take advantage of this excellent software development practice. Larry also talks about his "Ten Reasons BDD Changes Everything" along with some easy ways to begin implementation of BDD in your software development organization immediately and what the corresponding future steps would be to take full advantage of this technique.

About Larry

Larry Apke, CSM, CSP, is a recognized leader in the Agile community and a frequently sought-after expert speaker. Larry is the author of two small books on Agile: "Understanding The Agile Manifesto: A Brief & Bold Guide to Agile" and "Managers from Hell, The PMO is Dead, and Other Agile Stories."

Currently the Agile Program Manager for Oracle's Utility Business Unit, he has experience with Agile transformations at a variety of organizations including Apple, AMEX, USAA, Apollo Group. His practice includes providing free Agile and Scrum training to individuals looking to make career changes. This innovative program includes working with code bootcamps and non-profit organizations to get participants real-world experience.

Larry Cummings

Senior Atlassian Consultant, Isos Technology

Lessons From Implementing Agile Across the Entire Product Lifecycle

Product Managers / Product Owners track progress against work done by many teams, not just software development teams. How does an agile approach spread across all kinds of teams?

With the move to continuous deployment how do we orchestrate all that?

What you will learn:

How to lead an organization into an agile approach that spans the entire development lifecycle.

How the cultural change of DevOps impacts how you integrate an agile approach into this entire lifecycle.

About Larry

I help organizations create communities that share, cooperate and collaborate in alignment with the organization's mission. I translate the mission into real communities by creating digital products that make that mission happen.

I especially enjoy working with product development teams, helping find the right balance between the people that use new systems, and the machines that we use to build the new system.

I was raised an Army brat and love living in Phoenix Arizona. I'm married and have one child. I completely love sweeping generalizations.

Michael Callahan

Agile Coach & SAFe Program Consultant (SPC4), SolutionsIQ

Scaling Agile – There's no One-Size-Fits-All

Agile Development has permeated all sectors and sizes of organizations. This has led to a wealth of thought and options when it comes to applying agile at scale.

With variety comes complexity and many factors need to be considered when implementing a scaling strategy. What commitment from executive leadership do you have, what is your relationship with your customers, what parts of your corporate culture and identity need to be retained, and many other questions need to be answered.

In this session, Michael shares insight through experience in comparing and contrasting today's most common methods of scaling agile, the benefits and obstacles to applying agile at scale and leads a discussion on critical factors for finding the right fit for your enterprise.

Be sure to bring your thoughts, ideas and questions and join in the conversation.

About Michael

Michael brings more than 25 years of software development experience. His background includes a diversity of roles; including software engineering, product management, and senior management.

He has spent the last seven years acting as an enterprise/program coach, implementing scaled agile across large, globally distributed organizations in the Healthcare and Financial Services industries.

His experience with agile development traces back to 2002 when he worked on his first project utilizing Extreme Programming (XP). From there, he has practiced and implemented dozens of instances of Scrum, Kanban and a variety of scaling methods.

As a coach and trainer, he has travelled extensively throughout the United States and India delivering agile consulting services in the implementation, transformation and maturity of agile teams and programs.

Michael Hall

Senior Agile Coach & Trainer, Agile Velocity

An enterprise Agile journey can be daunting. It can be filled with surprise, loss of direction, crevasses, whiteouts, and tidal waves. It can also be filled with satisfaction, exhilaration, and a tremendous sense of accomplishment. Michael navigates the precipitous path to predictability by sharing 10 tangible steps to a successful enterprise Agile transformation. Warning - not for the faint of heart!

About Michael

Michael is a reformed waterfall software developer. Half of his career was spent missing customer expectations by using thick requirement documents, big design up-front, deferring integration, and pitching shoddy software over the fence to QA. The latter half of his career has been exceeding customer expectations using Agile methods such as Scrum, Lean, XP, Kanban, and Lean Startup. Today, Michael is a Senior Agile Coach/Trainer at Agile Velocity with 15 years of Agile transformation experience. He has practical experience in leading enterprise scaled Agile transformations, Agile process creation for startup companies, team coaching, individual mentoring, and developing/delivering Agile training.

Michael Vizdos

Managing Director, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC

Scrum In School -- Focus. #deliver

In this session, Michael Vizdos will share his story about why (and how) he is volunteering in schools — from 3rd grade to university graduate programs — to bring Scrum in the Real World to students.

You'll leave this session inspired AND have specific tools to help you get started with volunteering to help our future generation learn Scrum in School.

About Michael

Michael Vizdos is the creator of www.ImplementingScrum.com and travels internationally working with clients to improve delivery of products to their customers using Scrum and other Agile techniques. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer (since 2006) with over twenty-five years experience in all facets of software development and product delivery. He is active in the Lean Startup community; one of his current projects can be found at www.OneShinyObject.com. He co-authored a book with Scott Ambler about the Enterprise Unified Process and speaks at user groups and conferences internationally about all of the above topics (and more!).

Michael Vizdos is ​an active supporter, sponsor, and past speaker for the Phoenix Scrum User Group and Gangplank (both in Arizona and Virginia). He lives in Richmond, Virginia and can be found on [email protected] and www.michaelvizdos.com.

Michelle Swartz

Vice President, Global Infrastructure, American Express

Implementing Agile Everywhere

While Agile methodologies are typically only considered within software development organizations, far more opportunities exist to maximize efficiency when leveraged effectively. Learn how the Infrastructure organization implemented Agile into its service-oriented departments that would not have typically expected such opportunities, and witness the impact it could simultaneously have in software development organizations.

About Michelle

Michelle Swartz is a Vice President in Global Infrastructure at American Express. She has held numerous positions within Technologies, and currently is responsible for Site Services Americas which includes workstation support for campus and virtual employees; the TechCare web support portal and the Service Catalogue. Known for her "Care4Customer" support model, Michelle has worked with her Services teams to adapt Agile tools and methodologies. The resulting effort has created an organization that aspires to work more effectively together; remove impediments to meeting employee’s needs; and is focused on innovation and continuous improvement.

Nirmaljeet Malhotra

Enterprise Agile Coach, Improving

What's in your product toolbox? Using the right tools for creating hyper productive teams

In this highly interactive and engaging session for Product Managers and Product Owners, we walk through multiple behavioral and tactical tools to create a complete tool box which can be put to use in order to leverage the creativity, passion and expertise of development teams to make them hyper productive and high impact.

About Nirmal

Nirmal has 17+ years of experience in the industry. Having worn multiple hats including developer, analyst, product manager, scrum master and agile coach, Nirmal has been helping organizations embrace agility since 2007. Nirmal is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups and he also likes to express himself through his blog Nirmaljeet.com. In his current role, Nirmal is working as a enterprise agile coach with Improving at Dallas, TX.

Peter Green

Agile Coach and Trainer, Agile For All

The Leadership Circle: An Agile Framework for Leadership Development

If you want Agile to thrive in your organization, your top leaders have to not only support the shift, they must co-lead it. Agile is not simply a methodology that is implemented. It is a different way of thinking about running an organization to thrive in complexity. So what if leaders don't value Agile? This was my quandary for years until I discovered a leadership development model called The Leadership Circle. It is the most powerful tool that I've ever seen in helping individual leaders and teams of leaders make huge shifts in the way they see their purpose and possibility as leaders.

The Leadership Circle reveals a leader's Operating System: Internal assumptions (beliefs) that run behavior. It measures the two primary leadership domains– Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies–well-researched dimensions that directly impact a leader's capability to lead an Agile organization. In this session, you'll learn about these two domains, how they relate to success in creating Agile teams and organizations, and practice taking the two approaches to various challenges faced by session participants. Expect to walk away with concrete new ideas for how to help create more Agile teams and organizations!

About Peter

Peter Green is an Executive Agile Leadership Coach, Trainer, and Speaker. He helps leaders take full advantage of their gifts to thrive in complex times. Peter combines individual leadership development with his research in next generation organizational models to help executives lead engaged, high performing Agile organizations. As the Agile Transformation Leader at Adobe Systems, he helped the company make the critical business transition from perpetual desktop products to the subscription-based Creative Cloud. Now the Principle Leadership Coach for Agile For All, Peter is a CST and co-creator of the Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Leadership program.

Phil Ricci

Agile Coach; Principal Consultant, Agile Now

Accelerating your Team at the Temple of Vroom

Teams all start at the same place, but where they wind up depends on how we guide and nurture them. If we do good work the teams get to a point where they perform well, but can we afford the time to get to that point at a leisurely pace? During that development time delivery is delayed, discontent surfaces and the team stumble.

I propose that team development can be speeded to get teams more quickly to the point that members are co-joined to know and meet their goals. I offer to you the TEMPLE (Trust, Excellence, Motivation, Personality, Listen, Empowerment) as a way to more quickly speed the team into high performance status.

To work at the TEMPLE does not require an Indiana Jones bull whip but does require vision, planning and a little courage too. In this presentation we will discuss how to assess the team and develop strategies to use the TEMPLE to move the team forward quickly.

About Phil

Since being exposed to a fantastic team building experience (via the NLM) in college the capabilities of high performing teams has been my passion, it is what lead me to the agile world which is, at its heart a human centered profession. Working in manufacturing, health care, transportation, higher education, my calling has been clear; help teams and individuals achieve at the highest levels they are capable of. I've spent several years as a software developer building large scale systems, trainer, scrum master and agile coach (with clients; Maersk, Jeweler's Shipping, American Airlines and others). In all of those roles, enhancing the performance of teams has been a key to project success. I’ve been fortunate to be around some great teams and any small part I’ve had in helping them toward that success is my most prized accomplishment.

On the personal side, travel, SCUBA Diving, photography, shooting and getting time with family and friends are wonderful ways to have fun.

Reese Schmit

Agile Coach, Agile Velocity

Why Are We Stuck? Getting back to Continuous Improvement

Transformations stall. Teams get stuck in an improvement rut. Impediments lists grow. It's not uncommon for teams to plateau. When things are going well, it is difficult to find motivation to go from good to great.

As an Agile leader, it's important to be able to identify the symptoms your team or team-of-teams start to exhibit when they get stuck – when their momentum for positive growth and change stalls or plateaus – and what to do about it. This workshop will help you get your teams back in gear and on the path of relentless improvement.

About Reese

Reese has been in the software industry for the better part of 15 years. In that time, she has worn many hats, from User Experience Designer to Product Manager, QA Engineer to ScrumMaster. The knowledge gained from each of these roles allows her to frame problems from different perspectives and drive change through empathy. As an Agile Coach, she works to help organizations drive customer value, transparency, and collaboration and to motivate teams to continuously improve.

When she's not coaching, Reese is helping to run the Austin Atlassian User Group or the Agile Austin Coaching SIG. When she's not doing that, Reese is either chasing her tiny human girl or two canine boys around, hanging with her amazing husband, brewing beer, or, if by some miracle she gets to sit down, knitting.

Richard Kasperowski

Agile Trainer and Coach

Power Games for High-performance Team Culture

Want awesome teams that thrive in hierarchical organization structures? We talk about flat structures, self-organization, and holocracy, but the truth is that we all work and live within power structures. How do we navigate hierarchy and power to be our best and do be the best with our teams?

n this session, Richard makes the case for a team culture that’s safe for all team members regardless of the organizational structure around them. Session participants will join in a flight of fun learning activity sets. These will give you a taste of team awesomeness and how to start when you go back to work.

Richard Lawrence

Co-owner, Agile Trainer and Coach, Agile For All

Growing Your Facilitation Skills

Whether you're a ScrumMaster, Product Owner, leader, trainer, or coach, facilitation is a key part of your job. But few people have intentionally developed this skill. (Which is why so many backlog grooming sessions and sprint retrospectives are so painful.)

…going into any meeting with the confidence that it will produce a valuable outcome

…having your team members and peers respect you as someone who can help a group collaborate more effectively

…everyone in your meetings contributing in a useful way

…leading focused, productive discussions that end on time without feeling rushed

You can spend a lifetime growing your facilitation skills. But as with so many things in life, the 80/20 rule applies. The essential skills and tools you need to avoid the most common issues can be learned in a remarkably short time.

In this session, you'll learn and practice these essential skills and tools so you can facilitate more confidently and more effectively.

Come with a specific meeting in mind. What problems do you have facilitating it (or other meetings like it) today? How do you wish it looked different? Why does it matter for you, your team, your organization, and/or your customers?

About Richard

Richard is co-owner of Agile For All. He trains and coaches teams and organizations to become happier and more productive. He draws on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science. Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room.

Richard Sheridan

CEO, Chief Storyteller and co-founder, Menlo Innovations

Improving alignment in your project team.

Whether you are working on a new product, a long-range high-budget project, or a quick process improvement engagement, misaligned assumptions can create expensive and time consuming mis-steps.

Many initiatives would be well served to have explicit discussions regarding which key stakeholders require the greatest amount of attention, and then exploring the challenges regarding too much scope and too few resources.

In this hands-on high energy workshop, we will simulate a $72,000 project. Teams of attendees will work through stakeholder prioritization using a tool that we call Persona Mapping. These teams will then work through a scope prioritization process that we affectionately call The Planning Game.

We will wrap up the workshop by exploring how one company uses these tools to help its clients design and build products that end users love.

About Richard

Menlo Innovations CEO Rich Sheridan had an all consuming thought during a difficult mid-career in the chaotic technology industry ...

things can be better. Much better. He had to find a way. His search led him to books, authors and history, including recalling childhood visits to Greenfield Village every summer. The excitement of the Edison Menlo Park New Jersey Lab served as his siren call to create a workplace filled with camaraderie, human energy, creativity and productivity.

Ultimately, Rich and his co-founder James Goebel invented their own company in 2001 to "end human suffering in the world as it relate to technology" by returning joy to one of the most unique endeavors mankind has ever undertaken: the invention of software.

Their unique approach to custom software design, they named it High-tech Anthropology® has produced custom software that delights users rather than frustrating them. The programming team creates the software that works every day without the emergencies that are all too common in the tech industry. The process itself is so interesting that almost 4,000 people a year travel from around the world just to see how they do it. Many spend a week or more studying "The Menlo Way" being taught by the Menlonians who love to share their experience and knowledge.

In 2013, Rich and his publisher Penguin Random House took a chance that a business book with the words joy and love on the cover might have impact. They had no idea how the world yearned for such a message. His best selling book, Joy, Inc. - How We Built a Workplace People Love now has Rich traveling the world speaking about joy, creativity, and human energy in the workplace.

Sean McKeever

Director of Product Management, Edgenuity

Iterative Sketching: Accelerate your Product Team's Discovery

As you work to define the next feature, service or full product for your company, iterative sketching is a powerful tool that can illuminate amazing ideas from all members of your product teams and build shared understanding in the process. Unfortunately with the prevalence of digital design solutions, many product teams skip this important step and defer the "creative work" to their product designers. Attend this presentation for a hands-on opportunity to see how iterative sketching can be used to discover the next great iteration of your products.

About Sean

Sean has worked in product management for 18 years with a variety of technology companies, primarily in the K-16 education market. He also spent two years on mobile app and mobile platform product management at Workiva, which is where he first started using dual-track agile methods. His work there involved frequent interactions with prolific Product Management consultants, Marty Cagan and Jeff Patton, which accelerated his understanding and implementation of great discovery and delivery methodologies. At his current company, Edgenuity, Sean is leading the product organization through the transition from single-track agile to dual-track agile methodologies.

Thene Sheehy

Program Manager, Center for Enablement, PetSmart

The Agility Continuum

Where is your team on the Agility Continuum? In the world of 'agile', there are many points on the continuum. Assess your teams' transformation toward agility across 10 different facets in order to consider specific ways to improve along the journey. Consider which cultural aspects or processes may be holding you back in order to target them for change.

About Thene

Thene has spent 35 years in IT, with roles from COBOL programmer (back in the dark ages), to Data Analyst/Architect and JAD Facilitator (in the Information Engineering years), IT Director, Project/Program Manager, and Scrum Master. She has led teams of data analyst/architects, DBA’s, system/software designers, project managers, developers, business analysts, and application administrators. She was instrumental in the creation of a strategic data model for a major airline and a long distance telecom company, participated in the launch of the wireless industry, and created a strategic telemedicine technology architecture and roadmap for a healthcare system in the Midwest. She created a computer training center and internet café business, which doubled as a computer gaming center on weekends. Thene has worked with methodologies including structured analysis and design, information engineering, OO, iterative/spiral, and was most recently introduced to agile and scrum in 2013. Thene loves to work with highly productive teams in energizing and creative settings to solve big problems and create lasting solutions. She is currently with PetSmart - originally as Program Manager for Data Warehouse/Analytics & Integrations, and now in the new Center for Enablement.